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Melissa Huddleston

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Melissa Huddleston - Artists - Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

Photo by Molly Tierney.

The paintings of Los Angeles-based artist Melissa Huddleston are steeped in historic print and papermaking processes and suffused with her ruminations on primordial origins and the sublime happenstance of life. Through an experimental monoprint-style method, paint is not applied, but transferred, through marbling water baths to achieve layered organic shapes, swooshes, and swirls of opalescent color floating with mysterious levity. In these paintings, single-celled organisms and humanoid amphibians encounter each other in a luminous swamp. In ancient times, terrestrial life emerged capriciously through swamps. The imagery in the paintings teems with procreation, decay, mutation, sex, death, and the magnificent messiness of life. Huddleston’s processes are informed by the cultural, social, and feminist histories of works on paper and its previous segmentation from fine arts materials, with associations to minor arts, craft, and ephemera. Paper marbling is commonly connected with ancient Asian and European scriptural arts as well as the Japanese art of suminagashi. Huddleston’s paintings intersect aspects of these traditions with the idiom of modernist abstract expressionist painting.

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Primordial Spring

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Huddleston’s series of paintings on paper immerse the viewer in a luminous, prehistoric swamp populated with single-celled organisms, imaginary archaic life forms, and humanoid amphibian figures. Seen in silhouette, the figures’ complex relationships hover at the edge of narrative. Not quite land, not quite sea, swamps and wetlands represent a mingling of ecologies, a crossing of worlds. Encounters happen in these places that don’t happen anywhere else. The imagery in the paintings teems with mutation, decay, sex, death, and the magnificent messiness of life.

The paintings in Primordial Spring utilize processes adapted from historic print and book arts techniques. Through an experimental monoprint-style method, paint is applied to the surface of a water bath, manipulated, and then transferred to paper. The resulting paintings are dense with organic activity, and buoyant swirls of colors floating with mysterious levity.

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